Living in the Freedom of the Spirit - Week #8

We're on chapter 9 which finishes up the section on the emotions. Chapter 9 is an exciting chapter about living with our emotions.

The author deals here with the ongoing life in the Spirit as it relates to our human emotions. I have come to believe that our emotions, when healed and in right alignment with truth, can be wonderful boosters to our faith and motivators to righteousness. Most of us live in the place of either being pulled here and there by how we feel or we have succeeded in stifling our emotions so as to not be jerked around by them. The problem with stifling them is that we aren't living as true humans are meant to live: alive in all areas of our soul.

Please read early in the chapter what Tom Marshall has to say about Jesus' identification with us in all areas and how this is God's way of dealing with sinful and broken humanity - the incarnation. When by faith we are united with Him, His righteousness is mine, and all of my brokenness and sin is rolled onto Him. It's an amazing exchange that takes place.

I walk this out in my flesh by faith which means I incrementally take back what has been lost through sin (both my own and others' sin against me) through worship and developing the discipline of listening to God and obeying anything that I believe He's saying to me. This impacts the emotions by virtue of the fact that in the process of listening to the Living Word, He will call on me to take steps of obedience that will bring my emotions into alignment with His truth. This will both awaken deadened emotions and tame uncontrolled emotions. He alone knows how to best bring me into wholeness; that's again why the work of the Holy Spirit is absolutely imperative in this ministry of healing. No one knows me like He does and no one knows how to bring me into fullness of life!

As we grow and mature in obedience to God, we find that we are in that delightful place of living with our "spirit out front, as it were" so that we increasingly experience what's happening around us through our spirit grid rather than the soulish grid. The spirit is gaining its rightful place as the "integrating factor" in our personhood. The spirit, which is alive to God and aligned to His truth, becomes the ruling part of us as God originally intended and the soul takes its rightful place in alignment with the spirit.

The more this is the case, the more we understand what's really happening around us, and our emotional responses to the spiritual perceptions are now trustworthy, and we can live fully alive in our emotions and they actually help us to take action.

The beauty of this too is that because our spirit is "out front" now, what others encounter when they meet us is the life of Jesus coming through our personality, rather than meeting our soul life which isn't evil but it is not life-giving in itself. It's the spirit that gives life; the flesh profits nothing in terms of giving spiritual life to others. People encounter life when they encounter a person living in the freedom of the Spirit.

So the spirit of the person becomes the part of us that's out front, and like Tom Marshall says, we begin, at least in some measure like Jesus, to discern the true condition of others around us and experience the appropriate emotional responses triggered by spiritual perception (see pages 88-92).

This is a life-long maturing process so we won't reach absolute perfection in this before heaven, but it's great to be growing little by little. The Holy Spirit, on the basis of the Cross, is continually bringing His own into this - He's so good at this!

Lord, thank You for Your awesome work on Calvary and Your Spirit who takes the things of Jesus and makes them vitally real to us today!!! How can we thank you enough? You are worthy to be loved and adored now and eternally by all peoples!

For next week read chapter 10, The Freedom of the Will. Note Marshall's analogy using the parts of a car in his explanation of the functions of the mind, will, and emotions. What part of the car does he compare the mind to?...the emotions?...and the will? Have a wonderful week because of the Lord very real presence with you!